Friday, July 29, 2011

Silents & Talkies - A Matter of Innocence (1968)



As you can probably tell from my blog title, I'm a pretty big Hayley Mills fan (if you're out of the loop, "scathingly brilliant" is from a line she used repetitively in her film The Trouble with Angels) so when Casey & I found a dvd of this rare film, I HAD to see it! Being a fan, I was really hoping for something to rival the greatness of The Trouble with Angels or The Moonspinners, but this was definitely a flop. Not just a "what a bad movie" kind of flop, it was pretty much indescribable. I think Leslie Knope sums it up perfectly:



Hayley Mills plays a plain young girl (read: she wears glasses and her hair is not in a fancy updo) accompanying her aunt on a trip to Singapore. Not long after they arrive, her aunt has a heavy lunch that results in her sinking to the bottom of the pool when she climbs in on the ladder. It's the most bizarre death I've ever seen in a movie, and yet it was so funny that my stomach actually hurt from laughing so hard. (I should probably add here, so as not to seem like a total lunatic laughing alone in my bedroom over the death of a woman in a movie... I was watching this with Casey, Millie and Sarah during a chat. They were equally hysterical ;-D)

The movie just keeps sliding downhill from there... Hayley gets un-plained (read: contacts & a fancy updo) and begins dating a very strange hotel escort who seems to be moonlighting as a pimp/pornographer/drug dealer?! And I am 100% positive they changed his name repetitively throughout the film. I won't give away much more (I haven't actually given away anything yet.. honestly all of this takes place in the first 15 minutes or so of the movie, if you can believe it!) in case you want to see it. As strange and mind-boggling as this was, I'd still recommend it. Not every film has to be Citizen Kane, right? There are some wacky little weirdos that deserve some love, and I think this is definitely one of them. It's bizarre but definitely fun to watch, especially if you have some friends to watch it with who love bad movies just as much as you do ;-D

Buy it: ioffer